“I really loved your book! Would you sign my Kindle?”

OK. I’m a self-professed digital enthusiast. I’m a technology teacher and consultant. You’d think I would place myself firmly in the camp of digital over analog. MP3 over vinyl. Photoshop over the darkroom. Kindle over books.

Preposterous.

And yet… in a practical sense, I do listen to digital music, not records (in fact, I haven’t owned a turntable for years, and my old records have been gathering copious amounts of dust). I use a digital camera almost exclusively now. And I own a Kindle.

Back in the mid-1990’s I was happily working at one of the larger independent bookstores in the country and reading voraciously. There were no digital book readers. The half-millennial continuum of writing and printing remained intact. We in the book trade (even those of us with a strong interest in technology) were happily oblivious to the coming shift in the industry that would come from online retail and digital readers.

Now, that continuum is showing signs of stress. It is not broken, but it is suddenly becoming clear that the path has taken a new direction. Publishing is not the same. Book-selling is not the same. Books themselves are not the same.

What is a book?

If you had asked me this question in 1995 I would have had no trouble answering the question with confidence. A book is a physical object which serves as a container for written or graphical works. It is a collection of pages (arranged in signatures), bound along one edge between two protective covers. As physical objects, not all books are equal. Some are hard bound with nice thick pages. Others are cheap paperbacks with a very uniform, standardized feel. There are as many varieties of book in a physical sense as there are written books in a textual sense.

While I was working at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, I got great pleasure from attending book signings. Nothing thrilled me more than spending $25 (a considerable sum from my meager bookstore earnings) on a brand new hardcover and standing in line to have the author sign the book for me. In fact, as I worked there, I often got to meet some of these writers in the employee break-room or smoking area. And so I have a nice collection of signed firsts from such luminous characters as William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut and Peter Matthiessen.

In these days of Amazon Kindles and Sony Readers, I’ve been trying very hard to keep up with the flood of thought on publishing, but lets face it, the Internet is far too vast to allow anyone to “keep up”. Some interesting posts include:

Follow the Reader: The Outer Limits of Publishing
A Newbie’s Guide to Book Publishing: More on the Amazon Kindle (author JA Konrath’s fascinating discussion of the economics of self-publishing on Kindle)
Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web
Michael Hart, the inventor of eBooks, says the Kindle won’t go
Screenwriter of Complex Ideas Experiments With Kindle
and this favorite Got a Kindle, but miss that booky smell? This spray is for you

(These are just a couple of the more interesting posts I’ve stumbled upon in the last couple days)

Suddenly is seems that technology has propelled us forward into a highly convenient but awkward period in the history of books. Considering all the buzz surrounding these devices as technical accomplishments, and our relative inability to make any sense out of the legal foundations for the publishing industry, we should reasonably expect a very chaotic and fun period ahead. Already we have factions forming: The EFF, Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and others against a faction of reactionaries and nostalgics exemplified by Mark Helprin (see his May 2007 NYT Op-Ed), businesses (publishers, mostly, who cannot rightfully be called reactionary or nostalgic because they represent the commercial traditions of publishing as it has progressed for 500 years.) I don’t want to go over the ancient battles between RIAA and Napster, but all this is now part of the on-going discussion about publishing, Intellectual Property rights, and, ultimately, the ability for creative people to make a living off the IP they create as well as the ability for that creative work to sustain the consuming public and the publishing & retail industries which funnel these items into us.

Honestly, I’m not much of an oracle, but I do feel that the business model is faced with a vast army of tech-wise adversaries who have more and more tools at their disposal for rendering content, and that there is no way for the publishers to win. It just isn’t possible. They’d have to spend too much money fighting against a waterfall of free technologies designed to undo DRM and copy-protection. At least, this has been my way of seeing things for the last decade.

But now I’m coming to a new way of seeing things. Not only is it technically and financially unreasonable for the established business model (the publishers, and their advocacy groups like RIAA and MPAA) to control the digital content as they wish, it is suddenly becoming possible for creative producers and artists do more without publishers. It’s small, and it does rely on a delivery platform like Amazon.com (and believe me, they are a big business when it comes to working with little individuals) but still, they are there and a person can easily offer a title for publication there and expect to generate some income. The better and smarter the writer, the more they can generate.

But here’s the rub: Amazon. I can’t say I want to see all the established publishing houses go the way of the Dodo to see Amazon.com become the new face of publishing. As altruistic as JA Konrath’s blog on self-publishing sounds to us little people, to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, it sounds like a resounding advertisement for their business model. Sony have a far less capable device in my opinion, but their content model (especially the connection to Google Books) is advantageous.

What do we do now? Bezos declared “This isn’t a device, it’s a service.” when he was hyping the first Kindle. The device (that sleek white thing you paid $400 for) is basically nothing more than a very cool Welcome mat that beckons you into the cool stream of Amazon-only content. (I know, this is not entirely fair, because there are ways to have Amazon convert content to Kindle format for you at no cost.) But try self-publishing your novel for Kindle and not making it available via Amazon. Hmmm. Now I need an eCommerce system, a way to convert my novel from text to .azw Kindle format, and a way to make such a book relevant to a market where it doesn’t exist (no downloads via Whispernet, no “Folks who bought this also bought”, no Amazon at all. In the world of online marketing, Amazon are in the Pantheon, and it is not because of the things they say about themselves and the products they sell, it’s all a part of the mechanics of how they sell.

So here’s how I get the most out of my Kindle. First, I don’t use it all the time. Rather than purchasing some aerosol canister of book scent to spray and give me that whiff of physical authenticity, I still get books from my local library (I get lots, in fact). I have several interesting newer titles that I’ve purchased from Amazon which are always available and loaded on my Kindle. These I also access from the Kindle App in my iPhone (because nothing kills me more than having to wait an hour at a Doctor or Dentist office or waiting while I get my car serviced and not having anything interesting to read. I can tap right into my Kindle books from the device or my iPhone. I really like that.

Then, I load my Kindle up with tons of stuff from Project Gutenberg. I like to read to my kids, and so I have tons of classic Children’s books loaded on the device. Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s, Lewis Carroll, Edith Nesbitt (who is a real find), L. Frank Baum and J.M. Barrie. I have loads of books — everything from Thucydides to Poul Anderson. In all honesty, nothing says “Happy Geek” like reading Frederich Schiller’s (complete) History of the Thirty Years War as a free eText on your eBook reader. In fact, all these titles are available from Gutenberg as mobi formatted downloads (mobi is a DRM free format that is a precursor to Amazon’s .azw format and fully supported on the Kindle. The only mild inconvenience is that I have to download the content to my computer and then plug the Kindle in via USB to copy the new content. But, with a nice SD card, the Kindle can accomadate a ton of books, and I load a GB of free mobi books on mine just to ensure I never run out of good reading. I still have ample room for Amazon purchases.

I have no regrets about buying a Kindle: I am still a proud card-carrying Library patron, and I’m pleased to now say that I think Project Gutenberg is not just a good idea (which it has always been), but a great place to get reading material. I hate reading off computer screens any more than I have to, and the Kindle is a great electronic approximation of the printed page.

Now all we need to figure out is how we can get authors to autograph our electronic books.